


the other side of the window

by aurora_borealis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Death, Ramsay Bolton is His Own Warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:27:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29538903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: Almost nine years after you graduate from high school, a time you think about often but not necessarily for the reasons other people your age might think about it often, because you can’t say it was the best or the worst time of your life, Jon contacts you online about a memorial.
Relationships: Theon Greyjoy & Jeyne Poole, Theon Greyjoy & Jon Snow, Theon Greyjoy/Robb Stark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 14





	the other side of the window

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for addiction, domestic violence and abuse.

Almost nine years after you graduate from high school, a time you think about often but not necessarily for the reasons other people your age might think about it often, because you can’t say it was the best or the worst time of your life, Jon contacts you online about a memorial.

On Facebook, which is understandable because it’s probably the easiest way of getting ahold of someone you don’t regularly keep contact with, even if you barely use the site and only keep the tab open in case someone does try and contact you. (You don’t suppose he’d know your Instagram or if he even has one.) You’re trying to be more mindful of things like that now, now that you have a life of your own, and in fact have for the past few years even if it still feels new. Almost nine years ago, you might have been surprised that Jon would need to search your name on Facebook to find you. He almost seemed like a part of your life. But when people are young and don’t have much control over their circumstances, they tend to look at them as constants. You just got too used to not having control over your own circumstances. It’s very hard to not sometimes blame yourself. Even if it isn’t as much as usual.

 _To Theon,_ begins the message, like he’s writing some kind of letter, which is kind of funny. It makes you remember him showing up to English class in those Tripp pants and somberly performing his Shakespeare monologue. _I hope you get this message and that you have been doing well. I didn’t know where else to contact you. I’m messaging because I think you should know about this. There’s going to be a memorial ceremony back at our old school. It’s for Robb. They’re putting up a plaque and we’re going to have a memorial service after. I thought you would want to know about this, and come, if you can._ There’s a link to a webpage about the event, the details, the date.

Whatever “if you can” is supposed to mean. Does everyone think you’re dead or in jail or something? Or maybe that you’re too emotionally fragile to go. Or a polite invitation to not come. “If you can- we would understand. You don’t have to.” If this had happened right along when everyone else was happening it would make you mad and you’d make that clear, over Facebook, a phone call, real life, whatever. But it doesn’t make you mad. It just makes you wonder what everyone thinks of you now that you’ve been a memory to them for years, as gone as Robb is, maybe more. When someone dies people remember them. When someone leaves no one has to, even if they do. You guess not everyone back there has forgotten you, then.

 _Hey Jon,_ you write back, looking over his profile to see what’s up with him. He’ll have looked at yours and found nothing. You deleted everything off it after you stopped using. Not because you felt like you had to in order to stay clean but because you wanted to just start over and scrub away all the layers of the past you could. For his part, Jon has grown a hipster beard, which is the least surprising thing you’ve seen all day. He lives out in Vermont, probably in some kind of hippie neighborhood where half the people are registered members of the Green-Rainbow Party, and works at a State Park, undoubtedly saving the trees and quoting Thoreau at tourists and shit. There’s a picture of him with all the rest of his family minus Robb, a recent one, and you stare at it for a minute, seeing how they’ve all grown up. You recognize every one of them, which sure, isn’t much of an accomplishment, but the way they’ve all turned out just makes sense to you.

 _I’m doing all right. It’s a long story,_ you type, adding a smile face, which is one way of putting it, you suppose. _Of course I’ll come. Why wouldn’t I?_ Tone can’t really be conveyed over the internet, so you don’t know if he’ll take this as a rhetorical question or if he’ll answer in a long paragraph _well, Theon, I heard a rumor you died, but I couldn’t find your obituary online so I decided to just contact you in case_ , or something like that. You’re not sure if you mean it rhetorically or not, but you do want to know why he’d think you might not come, whether it was because of ability or desire.

 _(You don’t have to say it. It’s my fault he died, I know,_ you’d told Jon, years ago. Jon shook his head like you had said something you shouldn’t have.)

You hit send. His little icon says he was last active three hours ago. You hate that those things let everyone know when you’re online, when you’re not, when you last logged in. You think even after it stops making you feel afraid and paranoid, assuming it ever will stop, you’ll still dislike it on principle.

You close your computer and walk over to the calendar hanging on the wall. Every month has a glossy photograph of a horse. When you and Jeyne went to the mall at the beginning of the year to see what was on sale, all the calendars were 75% off, you got it then. She suggested- being a very organized person to the point where sometimes you think it’s a little weird- and you copied. Putting your schedule down on a calendar, so she said, is helpful for keeping track of what she has to do and staying organized and sometimes helps her look forward to things.

The picture of the month is a shining black horse running through a green field, and so far you haven’t written much on it. Using the nearest pen you can find, one from the local bank, you write “Memorial” over the calendar squares for next weekend, one word spread out across the days. It’s not like you need permission, but you know should tell your mother and Asha. And you definitely have to tell your boss at the salon, not really sure how your schedule is going to go for that block of time.

It’s a small word. But you only knew Robb for four years, which isn’t a very large fraction of your life now, even if it was then. Everyone else knew him longer. But you still think he knew you better than anyone else. When he was alive you thought no one would ever be able to know you the way he did. You didn’t want anyone to. You would have been happy just with him. You thought he was going to save you. From what, you hadn’t entirely figured ou. You just knew that your life in the Merrimack Valley region of Massachusetts, or maybe just your school or your family life, wasn’t like everyone else’s, and never would be, but Robb seemed happy, and if you could have shared your life with him, that would have been it. Everything would be better, you thought. But it probably would never happen.

You suppose- no, you know- you’re better off than you ever were. Better off than then, better off than a few years ago with Ramsay. You probably wouldn’t have been able to do this before. That’s probably a sign of progress. You can just hear Asha’s voice saying that. You can hear yourself saying, did you get that from Doctor Phil, and you can see her rolling her eyes and saying no, but can you believe he never interviewed our family? And then you’d both laugh and then stop and have a more serious talk. It usually goes along those lines.

_ 

One of the last times you spoke directly with Jon was in early June of that fateful year, soon before school got out for summer vacation. It was at someone’s house party and the whole overcrowded house was practically shaking with the force of the loud music playing from different radios and boom boxes and the MTV music videos on the television. A different song from every room, almost, “Pon de Replay” and “Shake That” and “Dance, Dance” clashing with each other like the loud voices straining to be heard.

“I just have to get out of this town,” Jon was saying, half to himself and half to you, waiting for Robb to come out of the crowd of his teammates and back to the two of you. “I mean, I love living with my family, but…” He was just holding one of those red Solo cups and not drinking from it. Not like Robb was. Robb had better tolerance than either of you. _Of course he does. Mother Russia gave that to him_ , you’d always say, half smiling at him when you said so, even though his family had been here for so many generations that no one in it even really spoke Russian, and his mother’s side was Scottish anyway.

You didn’t really understand when Jon would say things like that. He and his family lived in a nice house and they were doing well for themselves even if they weren’t exactly rich and everyone pretty much got along. It didn’t really occur to you then to wonder why Jon may have wanted to leave, why he may have felt he had to. Only that you couldn’t see any reason for him to want anything but to stay.

“So you are looking forward to college,” you said. “Are you leaving early?” You hadn’t even applied to any schools. Asha told you that you could at least look at trade schools, that you’d be a great cosmetologist or stylist and she was serious and not making fun of you, and you were considering something like that. But you hadn’t done anything yet.

“It’s not just that,” Jon told you. “You know what I mean? Don’t you ever feel like you’re not supposed to be here?”

You raised your eyebrows. “I can leave if you would like that,” you said with exaggerated concern.

“Oh, fuck off,” Jon rolled his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about.” You weren’t entirely sure, actually.

“You don’t get it,” you told him. Because you didn’t get it, and he was insisting you did. “If you are not supposed to be here, then why are you here?” If he didn’t think either of you were supposed to be here, was that saying more about the two of you, or here? Because by now, you didn’t hate this town. Maybe Jon didn’t, but you didn’t think he particularly liked it either. Maybe it wasn’t home and would never be, not really. But home was something you gave up when you were nine and had given up expecting to ever find again. Jon hadn’t indicated he didn’t see this place as home. You wondered why he didn’t just say what the issue was. No one would hear him over Nelly Furtado’s latest song anyway.

Jon just looked at you. “I can’t be the same person forever,” he said, shrugging. “I just can’t do that. So I can’t stay in the same place forever. I know you get that,” he said, and you didn’t have time to say anything else about it.

You saw Robb making his way back and you waved to him from across the crowded living room where you and Jon were leaned up against the wall, near some family photo of Robb’s hockey teammate and his siblings posing next to a snowman in front of their house. Some of the girls looked at Robb as he walked by and they always did and you couldn’t even be mad that you couldn’t openly turn your head towards him and put your hand on his shoulder when he talked to you because that was just the way things worked and it wasn’t their fault or his fault or even your fault.

“Hey,” Robb said, wearing his letterman jacket proudly even in the crowded room that was too hot even with the windows open, humid air pouring into the house. “What did I miss?” You laughed.

“You didn’t miss anything at all,” you said, “just us.” Sometimes just being around Robb was enough for you. Sometimes you thought that was enough to make you happy, that and nothing else.

A few weeks after that some drunk rich kid from out of town doing eighty miles an hour ran him over and kept driving. Robb didn’t even get to graduate.

_

For a while you’ve been living in the small house your mom lives in. Asha has her own place and so does your dad. Asha you see often, sometimes you stay with her. You don’t see your dad too often. As you get older you think it’s hard for him, not just for you, and you can see his perspective, maybe, even if you don’t forgive him for everything.

Your parents never really divorced officially- not necessarily out of religious objection or anything like that, more because it just seemed like they didn’t want to go through the whole process, and living separate was enough for them. They didn’t hate each other or stop loving each other or anything. They just couldn’t be together anymore. Their marriage didn’t start off having shared grief for its foundations, but it ended up that way, and there are worse things to share, but it’s not something that really helps. 

When you were younger you had a bad feeling if you and Robb were ever to be together, it would end that way, and it would be your fault.

It started when you were in middle school. Your mom would take you, sometimes Asha as well, to stay with your aunt for days or a week or so. You’d ask “Mayrik, did you and Hayrik have a fight?” and she’d just shake her head quietly and told you that wasn’t the problem. It was the truth. Your father never fought with your mother. They probably always had issues. It just got to be too much after a while. 

It’s a different house than the one you lived in starting at age nine that the two of them, and now you, live in now. Up in the North Shore in a town where tons of tourists flood into during the summer like Nor’easters. (When you were a kid you thought Nor’easter meant that the storms happened around Easter time. Mr. Luwin at school who was in charge of the ESL program taught you all about what local terms like that meant.) It’s not that far from where you went to high school, from where the Starks live. Not that far, comparatively. It’s not halfway across the world.

There are old photographs hanging on the walls in your mother’s place. Char atchk amulets and charms everywhere, and religious icons. Sometimes you want to ask your mother if she wants to go home. (She’d never said _her_ life was here now, just her and Asha’s. But it hadn’t felt like your life was here then. Sometimes you felt you didn’t have a life anywhere and that distracted you from thinking about what it all meant for everyone else in your family.) Because you know that’s what it is to her. Not here. Not anywhere in this country no matter how much she likes her place, this town, this area, this state.

_

The 90s were a weird time to come to America. Maybe every era is a weird time to come when you’re coming to a weird country. You came to a state only a little smaller than your country, with about twice the amount of people. Your mother told you that before you came and you wondered if coming to America would be like disappearing into a crowd. Sometimes in later years you thought sometimes that was true and sometimes it couldn’t be further from the truth, but neither of them were ever the result you needed.

When you first got here Bill Clinton was president. That year, the year you left, Armenia got a new constitution, but it was never on the news. On the rare occasion you went to the local Greek church with your family, there would be some other Armenians there. The priest spoke mostly in Greek, but you didn’t really learn any of that language. You would learn English from the books your parents had, and Asha, and the kids at school, and the programs in school for ESL learners, and the news, and MTV, and the Aaliyah and Mariah Carey CDs you listened to, and the Blockbuster in town that Asha would eventually get an afterschool job at. Selena died the year you came too, and that was how you found out who she was and through her music you learned a little Spanish. A few years into your new American life you saw that Gorbachev Pizza Hut commercial on the television during dinner with your family and you all got quiet and kind of confused like you’d seen an old acquaintance but he didn’t recognize you anymore.

Asha had been twelve when you all came here. By the time you hit that age, you had seen enough of both America (even confined in this small corner) and American movies and television to realize something, that life and art weren’t always so different, and there was some truth in all those long movies about mobsters and casinos and nightlife you and Asha watched because your parents had bigger problems than trying to monitor what you were watching on TV. (It didn’t really shake your perception of the world; you figured the rules went different but the results played out similarly. You live hard, and surviving means getting hard enough to stand it, without getting broken down. That was how you interpreted the world for the first nine year of your life.)

This country, you thought, was like a casino. The house always won. You could maybe strike it big, but if you got anything it probably wouldn’t be that much, and you’d just as likely lose everything you had and then some. You shared this thought with your father once. He shook his head and laughed bitterly, and then he told you something he wanted you to keep in mind- that whatever any of you had left, none of it was something anyone, here or anywhere, could take from you.

‘99 was the year Asha had started working at Blockbuster after school, and she told you customers asked her tech support type questions about Y2K as if she had anything to do with the whole internet and why didn’t they just ask the people at Best Buy or something. But when 2000 came the computers still worked including the home computer your mom had picked up secondhand, which didn’t get any worse, even if she said it was never going to get any better, which you thought could probably be applied to a whole lot of things aside from the ancient-looking beige box that couldn’t be used if someone was on the phone.

The year you started high school and met Robb was also 2000, Y2K, the first year of the new millennium. That probably means something. You’re not sure what. You already knew why you weren’t like other boys by then. Back before you came, you sometimes had a vague idea but didn’t realize why- back in Armenia you looked like everyone else and talked like everyone else. But that didn’t apply here, and maybe that was why you realized or maybe it was just that coming to America forced you to be a fast learner. In any case, the year you met Robb, it was a new millennium.

But you had known since you were a small child that history doesn’t stay locked up in the past. It can follow you, or stay next to you, aging, but standing in place. America didn’t teach you that. No, you knew all about that long before you ever came.

_

“Dude,” Robb had said to you the last February he was alive. He’d gotten early acceptance to UMass Lowell and had gotten a hockey scholarship. “You should go to college too.”

You rolled your eyes and laughed. “Why?” you asked. You’d had this conversation a lot of times before. Sometimes you would tell him, I’m going to get famous, then I won’t need college. Sometimes you’d just say college wasn’t for you. “If I don’t, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go. I’m probably going to be here forever. Close enough to where your school is. We’ll see each other all the time.” You weren’t like these American kids on TV or the movies or even at your school who dreamed about going to New York or LA, some faraway big city- was Boston too close for them or something, you wondered. Of course, there were a lot of kids who were satisfied going to Boston or just never leaving Massachusetts, because people from this state very often are just like that, you’ve found. You wonder if the fact that you’ve never left means you’re now one of them. 

Robb looked at you, his blue eyes so serious. “You’re really smart, Theon. I’m not sure if you think you are, but you are.”

You smiled at him to let him know you weren’t serious when you said, “what, if someone doesn’t go to college, they’re not smart? You typical rich American white boy.” Robb sighed at you. You can’t save me, you thought, but you didn’t say that, you wouldn’t have said that to him.

“There are scholarships for people,” Robb said, “you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of money.” You were quiet for a moment, thinking about how well he knew you. How much you allowed him to know about your life, your family. Of course, you’d talked about the money thing before, but you hadn’t brought it up during or before this conversation.

You weren’t not even sure exactly what you’d study, but that wasn’t really it, you’d have found something, probably to do with clothing. If your dad had anything to say about it, by that point in your life, you were thinking, fuck it. But you didn’t think you would ever be able to make a career out of something like that, and wasn’t that the point of college, getting some kind of prestigious or at least professional career. You weren’t sure where you’d go afterwards, if there would ever be a life for you here or anywhere. Sometimes you felt like you had no country, you hadn’t since you were nine and maybe you never would again.

Maybe, you thought then, the real reason was that coming of age meant making decisions about your own life and you had no idea how to do that. The decisions had been made for you, by your family or by world events or by the school system, anyone but you.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Robb,” you told him quietly. He was silent for a moment and he put his hand on your shoulder and nodded his head slowly.

“I’m not going to claim I know what you’re going through,” he began carefully, and you wanted to tell him, but you do, but you know more than anyone ever could. There were so many things you wanted to tell him but didn’t know how. You thought about him all the time, but you didn’t tell him that. You didn’t tell him that just last week on St. Sarkis’ Day your family didn’t really do anything, they never really did even back home, but you dreamed of him, and on St. Sarkis’ day people dream of the person they’re going to marry. You didn’t tell him it wasn’t the first time you dreamed about him; you knew even if it was legal as of last year, you weren’t ever going to be together, married or not. That you wanted to, and sometimes you thought he wanted it to, but you’d never be able to really do it. You didn’t know if you knew how to let him in, if you’d already showed him as much as you could. “But I….I just want you to know that I’ll be there for you, whatever you end up doing.” He wasn’t ever afraid to touch you, not the way you were afraid to touch him. But you didn’t push him away when he put his arms around you. You just felt yourself go limp and you heard him tell you under his breath, it’s going to be okay, man. His mouth was so near yours. It’s all right, he said, it’s all right.

“I don’t know,” you told him, under your breath.

“It can be,” he told you, holding onto you. Moving toward you, letting you lay back on his bed.

For the time being, he was right, you guess.

_

You place your duffel bag into the back of Asha’s truck and get in the passenger seat, buckling yourself up and then taking out your phone. _I’m coming now,_ you text Jon, and then put the phone in your coat pocket. If he texts you back you’ll see it later, and you’ll be in town soon enough, anyway.

“How much do I owe you for gas money,” you ask Asha.

“It’s really not that far a drive,” she says, putting the key into the ignition, “but I mean, if you really want to talk about it…” she shifts her eyes and smiles at you slyly. “We can talk about it later,” she says.

“Good. You know that I hate math,” you say flatly, and after a moment, you smile at her.

“How about,” she begins, “on the way there we do my music. And on the way back when I come get you, we can do your music.”

“Sure,” you tell her. “I’m ready to listen to some screaming.” She always liked music that was inherently loud even when the volume was down. As kids, she introduced you to Eminem and Kittie, told you listening to the fast-paced songs was helpful to understand when people spoke in English fast, although Kittie’s screams sometimes didn’t sound to any language at all to you. Now, she puts in a Johnny Cash album instead of her many heavy metal and hard rock CDs. The guitar starts playing. A car ahead of you swerves for seemingly no reason.

“Well,” she says, “as long as we see that we know we’re still in Massachusetts.” You laugh, but only a little. “You can talk about it, you know,” she tells you. Sometimes you talk about things with her. It’s just hard.

“Maybe when I come back,” you say to her. “After it happens maybe I’ll know what to tell you.”

“All right,” Asha says. “That makes sense.” She’s quiet for a minute. “While you’re at the memorial and doing whatever you need to do there I’m going to be in town.”

You start to say, “you don’t have to keep track of me,” but before you say even half of that she continues.

“I really do understand that you probably won’t want to do it. But I’m going to be staying with him for the weekend. I haven’t seen him in a while. I really should.” You realize she can only be talking about your father, who still lives there. He probably still wants to go back. He probably never will.

“He doesn’t want to see me, Asha,” you say, shaking your head. You remember when you first started using, after you’d already gotten fired from your job at Macy’s for drinking at work, and your father said to you that if you wanted to destroy your own life, well, he supposed we were all in _The Land Of The Free_ now- sounding as angry at this country as he was at you- so why not, if you wanted to that much, but destroying yourself was hurting your mother. And you laughed and asked him how he knew that if they didn’t even talk. And you think he was as angry at you for being right as you were angry at him for being kind of right also.

(“She’s already lost sons,” he’d told you, in Armenian, a language that at the time you did not consider your own. He never spoke English at home. “You- I have given up on you. You are killing yourself. If you don’t care about yourself, that is fine. You should at least care about how that will affect your mother. Do you think her therapy, her medication, is free?”

“Fuck you,” you’d said, in English, “I don’t care if you give up on me.” That wasn’t even true. You wondered if he could tell. “I don’t care about you any more than you care about her.” You just said that to have something to say.

“Then keep going,” your father said, “keep going until you die. Don’t you know what your mother and I went through? What our family went through before we came to this place? Clearly it never meant anything to you,” he said, evenly, his eyes far away from you. “I can’t stand to see you anymore. When I look at you I see your brothers dead. I see the friends your mother and I lost. I don’t understand how you- how you became this way.” He didn’t say he didn’t understand why, though.)

Asha shakes her head, not at you. “Listen, Theon,” she says. “I don’t agree with everything he does. I’m not telling you what to do and I’m not forgetting anything he’s done. I just think our family won’t ever get better if we can’t at least try to understand each other.”

“Then maybe it’s never going to get better,” you say dryly.

“Yeah,” Asha says after a moment, “maybe. But you can’t blame me for trying.”

You suppose you can’t, and for the next few minutes you and Asha silently listen to Johnny Cash play his guitar and sing about the ghost riders in the sky while other drivers yell out the windows and slam on their horns.

_

When you were a kid and you and your family first moved to America you asked your sister if it meant you were Americans now.

Asha looked at you like you should have known better, and explained to you- “no. We’re still Armenians,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact, her voice still beginning to grasp the English pronunciations she learned much easier than you did. “And we’re not afraid of nothing, okay?” she said, smiling a little. Much later you realized she thought you were afraid of being in this new place. Maybe you were. Sometimes you think you should have been but probably weren’t.

(Years later Asha had told you to be careful. You’d come back to your mom’s place in the middle of the night and she’d been there and took one look at the bruises around your throat and eyes- it was before Ramsay, you don’t even remember this guy’s last name- and asked you seriously if you felt you deserved to get hurt like this.

You turned up your mouth and narrowed your eyes and held up your head, suppressing shivers, your skin feeling like you’d been rubbed with ice from the meth even though it was the middle of the summer. You’d thought it was ironic at first and you’d joked about it. You always liked pretty things. Of course, you ended up on the drug everyone called crystal. Well, that one and others. On the random occasion you go to NA meetings you use that line. Sometimes people laugh. Maybe it doesn’t always sound funny the way you say it. Maybe it’s just that other people don’t find it funny at all.

“You’re just jealous,” you’d told her, knowing it wasn’t that at all, knowing no one really wanted you, least of all more than Asha, even though you were implying they did. But you had to say something, because you did think you deserved it, but more than that, you didn’t even think it was a big deal. Hadn’t Asha been the one to tell you not to be afraid? _We’re not afraid of nothing,_ she’d said in this country’s language before she understood half of it, and you’d felt like the two of you were in some old cowboy movie. And then she was afraid for you, and you didn’t know what to do then.) 

Ramsay would make fun of your accent and your words if you got something wrong and everything else. He said it would be so easy to just “finish the job” with “your people” but there wouldn’t be much of a point in it because of how easy it would be even if you’d all have it coming because you probably wouldn’t even put up a good fight. He’d tell you that you weren’t any good at making a life for yourself here and you obviously didn’t belong here and you should just go back, that the government would be smart if they just get rid of all the people who’d come here only to prove as useless as you were, but then, weren’t “your people” _really_ traditional, fanatics really, they probably wouldn’t want you anymore if they knew “what you were”. As if you couldn’t turn on the TV or radio in those days in this country without hearing about people like you (you couldn’t even say the word- after all if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be with Ramsay, would you. _Hamaserramol_ , that was what your father said. He said he knew that was what you were and that wasn’t the problem, he didn’t even care about that). Being called abominations destroying the country, doomed to Hell, all that. Ramsay would say sometimes he “did research” on your culture and history. That you weren’t honest people, that you were criminals and terrorists and mobsters in your home country and here and everywhere else, and everyone who knew you hated you. That you technically weren’t supposed to be alive because you weren’t supposed to have ever existed. Is that why you’re like this? He’d ask you, almost pityingly. Because you’re so used to being hated, and no one’s ever actually wanted you?

You made yourself listen to it. You didn’t tell him to stop when he did this, ever, no matter what he said. The worst part was that sometimes you even believed it, about yourself, if not about anyone else. Maybe that was when you realized you had to get away from him even if he killed you. 

Sometimes it’s hard to remember things from long ago exactly the way they were. Sometimes it’s hard to remember things exactly the way they were even when they weren’t very long ago.

_

Asha drives past the sign telling you that you’re back in your old town. Technically, hometown. Technically not, at the same time. Always much more complicated than it should have been. You can still see the highway in the distance.

You don’t hate this town. Sometimes you did. Sometimes you loved it. You weren’t entirely sure if you ever came to one single conclusion about it. Most days you missed Armenia, even though part of you believed you would never go back, that it was gone forever, at least to you. You were afraid that your memories were fading every day and would soon be gone and whatever you’d remember wouldn’t even be true. So you tried to write things down, although you didn’t like keeping journals, and eventually you just told Robb things. Because he was willing to listen, you wanted him to know. You think you realized you loved him, even if you didn’t yet understand exactly in what way, when you told him about Vardavar, and he told you that you should take him one day. _Show me around,_ he said, _rent a car, do a road trip around the country, it’s not that much bigger than this state, it would be cool._

_Really_ , you said, trying not to show how you felt. _Most people would probably think it was depressing and boring._ Sometimes you hated yourself for remembering it with sadness, as if your family was any happier here. 

_I don’t_ , Robb said, and you didn’t know anyone could be that sincere.

It was harder to tell him things about here. Because when you lived back in Armenia it was your home and that was that. Here, things didn’t make as much sense, and were so different from what he was going through that sometimes you didn’t even want to talk about them even if you knew he would understand.

Like the time Asha was at work and some people in line were talking really loudly so she couldn’t hear her customer even after she asked him to repeat himself, and he yelled at her and called her a dumb bitch and told her if she couldn’t understand English then she should just go back to wherever backward shithole she came from and let someone from here have her job. And Asha’s boss took her side and everything and the people behind the guy apologized to her. And she told you that it didn’t hurt her. Not at all. That when her boss yelled at the guy she laughed, and she wasn’t going to let some loser racist douchebag upset her, with the implication that you shouldn’t either. And your parents talked with the two of you about it and your mom told you that some people were never going to understand but there would always be people that would, and family would understand, and you just had to find people who understood. And your father was quiet but you could tell he was mad, because he couldn’t do anything, and he told Asha she was smarter than so many of these horrible people in this country and they would never be able to appreciate her, and he looked at you and told you that you needed to learn to tell when people were like that, because not everyone here was, but enough people were, enough that it mattered.

You never once told Robb about that. You couldn’t. Even though you told him about how if you went back a few generations most of your family had been killed. That your brothers had died at war. That sometimes you worried if your father didn’t insist on not speaking English at home, English would be the only language you remembered, and that you feared this would be inevitable if you ever moved out.

“So what do you think?” Asha asks, lowering the volume on the CD and turning to you when the light goes red. “Does it look familiar?” She comes here frequently enough that anything new wouldn’t surprise her, no changes would have caught her off guard. You haven’t been here in years. Maybe it’s all new or maybe you just forgot.

The Irish bar with its dark green awning looks familiar. Of course, there must be countless places that look like that in this state, but you recognize the sole red neon sign in the otherwise dark windows. You know you’ve been here before. You know how long it takes to walk or drive from here to the commuter rail, to the Greek church, to the bridal boutique, to the Vietnamese restaurant by the library. Some houses that are still standing, some that may not be still standing.

“You’re not….going to Dad’s house, are you,” you ask even though it’s a safe bet she isn’t. Asha doesn’t ask you why don’t you just call him Hayrik. She stopped asking years ago even though sometimes you still call your mom Mayrik.

Asha sighs. “No, Theon,” she says, sounding almost bored. “If you want me to just drop you off at…at their place,” she doesn’t say Jon’s place, or Robb’s place, or the Stark house. “I can do that.”

“Yeah,” you said. “I mean, I said I was on my way. I don’t want them to think I flaked out on them.” It’s not like you wouldn’t have done something like that in the recent past.

Asha nods. “I get it,” she says. She drives until she gets to the neighborhood that was considered better real estate and probably still is. The people who live here aren’t quite rich but they’re better off than a lot of other people in town. The Starks are solidly white collar, another term you learned when you came to America. The house is a colonial and you can see there are lights on and a few big, new-looking cars in the driveway, not that you know much about cars. Asha stops a few houses down, so they wouldn’t be able to see you from inside. “We can stay here for a few minutes if you want,” Asha says, taking a drink from the plastic bottle of water she’d gotten from the drive through Dunkin Donuts on the way.

You take a few deep breaths in and out like you learned how to in therapy. At first you didn’t think it would work, but it ended up helping. Therapy was kind of a last resort for you, and though you couldn’t begrudge her for doing it herself, Jeyne becoming a licensed gun owner and going to target practice at a range didn’t seem like your thing at all no matter how much it “cleared her mind” and how “liberating” she said it was. She’s a good shot. She tells you that you could be too. You still don’t like holding guns. Maybe it’s because she looked you straight in the face and told you she could never see him again because if she did, she’d shoot to kill, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to stop herself. Maybe it’s because guns make you think of war and how your brothers died. That if you had been older you might have gone the way they did.

“Yeah,” you say. You take out your phone without looking to see if you have any messages in it and show it to Asha. “It’s on. I’ll try and pay attention, if I don’t answer it right when you call or right after…I’m probably okay,” you tell her. “And I have the charger with me.”

“Wow, ara,” Asha says, half-smiling, “you’re all prepared to live in the wild.”

“Thank you,” you tell Asha. “Good luck hanging out with Dad, yeah?”

Asha nods her head. “It’s not that bad,” she tells you reassuringly. “And…I hope this will be all right for you.” A few years ago, that probably would have offended you, but then, a few years ago there was nothing Asha could have said that would have felt like understanding even if it was.

I sure hope so too, you don’t say. You tell her you’ll see her soon and she says she’ll be in touch with you before that.

Asha’s car is gone by the time you get to the front door. Maybe that’s for the better. You ring the doorbell and notice there’s a new welcome mat, and it actually says “welcome”. The ramp Bran used is still there. The dog bowl outside the door is still there, but it’s probably a new one. Deep breaths, you tell yourself. It’s a house unlike the one you grew up in, on a street unlike the one you grew up in. You had been to Robb’s house countless times before you invited him over to yours, despite your mother always saying you were welcome to invite any friends over. It’s not that you thought he would judge you for not living in a house like his. You just felt like inviting him to your house would be a step into grounds unfamiliar to you as well as him. To let in an outsider into the world of you and your family, but to also, more noticeably, bring into light that he was an outsider to your world and what that world may have been was something you didn’t entirely know how to define then.

In Robb’s house, you knew you didn’t belong. But he never made you feel that way, and that was all the difference.

Jon answers the door. He looks mostly the same as he does in his Facebook pictures, which is mostly the same as he looked nine years ago, just older and less of a mall-goth. He has dark circles under his eyes that you didn’t pick up on in the pictures- it’s probably because the past few days have got to have been busy and draining for him.

“Hey,” you say to him. It comes out quieter than you expect.

“I’m…I’m glad you came,” Jon says after a moment. “Come in.”

_

When you were thirteen your favorite movie was _Flashdance._ Asha had a part time job at the local Blockbuster, which obviously doesn’t exist anymore and as she says is “as defunct as the fucking Soviet Union”, and managed to get R-rated movies that way even though neither of you were technically old enough to see them in theaters. Although, you had to say, you were old enough to realize that maybe life wasn’t always like the movies, but the movies very often were like life. (She knew you didn’t rent it to see Jennifer Beals dance half-naked, and your mother probably did too, but maybe your father didn’t know that, and that was fine by you.) The movie was made and released a good amount of years before you even set foot in the country, but it felt familiar to you. It was about this girl named Alex who worked as a welder by day and a bar dancer by night, and she studied ballet and wanted to go to this dance school and become a professional. You thought you were a lot like her. You would look ahead to tomorrow, and the days and years ahead, and you knew there were no realistic chances that you’d get out of there. Not even to go back across the globe, especially not, on some days, you’d think. This country wouldn’t ever be your home, just your workplace, same as your father.

You’d think about getting out one day when you were an adult, but only really just think about it, not planning the way Robb and Jon researched colleges and things like that. You didn’t have the talents Alex did. You just had the desire, which is pretty useless without something to back it up. Still, every time she went back to the warehouse she lived in and practiced her dance between her jobs, it felt like something out of your life. How she’d just give herself up to the music euphorically like nothing was wrong in the world, the way you’d get home from school and play your CDs before going to one of your after-school jobs, or just playing them so you couldn’t hear any family arguments. Alex could visualize a world- in her mind at home, or in some future- and so did you, or at least you tried, something beautiful and glamorous and special. Alex was objectively a beautiful woman. A beautiful woman who found a rich man who loved her and helped her get the life she had worked so hard for. So that obviously counted for something around here, this big and varied but sometimes consistent country, if people liked the way you looked. Of course, Alex was much more than just sexy and beautiful. But you- you’d have to work with what you’d been given, if you ever wanted more than some stolen moments of aspiration in between the rest of your life. Nothing for your family as a whole ever changed for the better, not even after coming to America, not really; something your father was well aware of, something that you think considered him to regret coming here. (“We can’t go back,” you’d hear your mom say to him, like they were trying to figure out a difficult math problem rather than fighting. “We don’t have the money and besides, the children, their lives are here now.” The first part was true. Sometimes you weren’t sure about the second. Sometimes you thought Asha could have made a life, a good one, wherever she landed. You were so jealous of her it took you years to understand that she was just a kid, too.)

You were different enough, though, that you often considered whether it wouldn’t be too much to ask for if things could get better for you.

_

Jon showed you to the guest room, which you remember, and you dropped off your bag in there. Ned and Catelyn are at work. Rickon is in school, the same high school you went to. Bran, Arya, and Sansa are on their way, all of them in college. It feels wrong, somehow, that you’re here before all of them, like you should have been more thoughtful and waited. “I took some days off from work to come down here,” he says, and you wonder if that’s his way of asking what’s up with you, what you’ve been doing for work, where you’ve been living. That’s a long story, you think. But you guess it’s not so long if you’re just talking about now.

“Yeah,” you said. “I saw you work at a State Park. On your Facebook, that’s where I saw it. That’s. That’s cool,” you said, your voice sounding detached. You hadn’t ever thought you’d be back here. Upon reflection, you’re not sure if you ever actually stayed in the guest room. “I’m a stylist. I work at a salon in Gloucester. I just don’t really use Facebook much anymore.” You don’t say you’re good at your job and maybe it’s the first time you’ve ever been good at something. You’re not entirely sure of what to say about yourself right now without going into everything else, and you kind of don’t want to, not just because it’s uncomfortable and you haven’t seen Jon in years, but also because it feels wrong to make it about you when you’re here for Robb.

“I get that. Ever since I moved out there I don’t really waste so much time on social media anymore. I think I’m finally where I should be in life,” he says with a solemness that doesn’t match his words, like he feels wrong for saying it now.

“I just…want to thank you for inviting me,” you say after a long moment, unsure of how long the two of you can go on evading the subject of why the two of you are here.

“Well,” Jon begins, after being silent for a good amount of time. “It wasn’t just me. I mean, I’m not the only one organizing the memorial…I wasn’t the only one who thought you should come and no one else thought of it.” You hadn’t said that, but you don’t ask him why he went to that conclusion. Maybe he just wanted to make you feel welcome or something. Which wouldn’t be your first priority right now if you were in his place, but you suppose he’s trying to make this all go well. He doesn’t know about the years in between now and when you last saw each other, but you knew each other once. Now that you’re older (Asha has said “you’re not fucking _old_ just because you’re over twenty, do you think I am too?” to you about a hundred times) you suppose he gets what it’s like to feel like you have to prove that you belong somewhere. Even if this was his house and his family, and he was more of a brother than a cousin to the other kids, his birth certificate still said “father- unknown” because his biological father didn’t stay by his mom. Which wasn’t really your situation at all, but you were both what uptight Stepford types would call “a little different,” and you recognized that in each other.

At this point you’re both sitting next to each other at the edge of the guest room bed without looking at each other. The comforter is this faded blue and gray paisley and there’s a painting of a Cape Cod seashore from a craft fair on the wall. You remember both of them.

“Well, at least something’s finally being done for him,” you say, not sure whether it’s a good or bad idea to start.

You remember you and Jon were trying to talk about it after it happened, after the funeral. You were both trying to keep quiet but you weren’t good at that and neither was Jon, sometimes, including then. Jon was saying, _I know if I found that little rich fucker I’d hit and run him myself, so maybe it’s a good thing for everyone the news is keeping him anonymous,_ and you were telling him, _don’t, it’s my fault, I wasn’t there, if I’d been there-_ and he cut you off and said, _what, you’d have stopped it? Come on,_ and you’d said, _what the hell is that supposed to mean? And if you found the guy you’d kill him and go to fucking jail because that would be what your family needs?_ And then you were both yelling at each other all these awful things and you weren’t even speaking in English anymore and then you noticed Jon was quiet, so you stopped talking, and Bran and Arya and Sansa were at the door, their eyes wide, they’d been listening. Sansa’s mouth was open like she was trying to say something that wouldn’t come out, and Bran was just staring like he knew what both you and Jon were thinking, and you wondered why the two of you were even fighting. “Just shut up, okay,” Arya said finally, and it shocked you because for the first time she said those words and just sounded more defeated and disappointed than anything. “Our parents can hear you.” But that was years ago and none of you are really kids anymore except Rickon, who thankfully had been spared seeing that all those years ago, and hopefully he doesn’t remember.

“For a long time I just focused on hating the guy who did it. I didn’t even know his name. And I mean, it’s not like I don’t hate him anymore,” Jon says, his voice matter-of-fact, and grave, calm and serene like he’s telling his story on some kind of talk show instead of just talking to you. “But after a while I just started thinking, that wouldn’t bring back Robb, or undo what happened. And then I just…grieved, for a while. I allowed myself to feel what happened.” He nods his head, to himself. “He never got a memorial service, but I suppose now is a good time. I think I’m ready for it now. I think it would be good for everyone, and I like to think he would have wanted us to…remember him not just as someone who got killed. To be happy at least some of the time we remember him.” There’s a bitterness in this last sentence, as if he regrets not doing this sooner.

“I think he’d definitely be happy with his family right now,” you tell Jon. You wonder who else has stayed in this guest room. You almost feel like a ghost haunting this house.

“I know he loved you too,” Jon says, putting his hand on your shoulder and you almost flinch, but you don’t, because you brace yourself and sense it coming and because you’ve been getting better about managing your panic at being touched. “And I just want you to know- I don’t know if you still think it was your fault, but I never blamed you.”

You had wished he did in a way, back then. Robb had been at that post-game party alone, and Jon was at a college visit and if you’d been with him you would have called Asha to drive the both of you back, but he was alone and he tried to walk back home because no one decided to be the designated driver and along came the car a few streets from his house.

“Jon, I didn’t mean to upset you,” you start to say after a moment, because you’re not sure what else to do.

“No,” Jon says after a second, “you’re not. I’m able to talk about him, you know.” He doesn’t really sound mad, so much as slightly annoyed, slightly amused. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. That it’s…good to talk about all this sometimes.” You wonder if he’d been to a therapist or not and decide not to ask, at least not yet, and then you wonder if he’s trying to passive aggressively recommend you that you should do it.

“If you want to talk I’m here,” you say to him. You guess that’s the least you can do for him. And maybe if you wanted to talk, he’d say the same, but you’re not sure if you want to, least of all because where would you even begin, back before you and your family even knew the name of this town?

He nods his head, accepting. “If you don’t mind,” he says, “later you can help out getting ready. You know, setting up for the ceremony, getting ready for the memorial service.”

You give him a slight smile. “I came here, didn’t I?” He shrugs, raising his eyebrows. 

“I hope your family’s okay,” he says, quietly, after a long moment.

“We’re getting by,” you tell him. “It’s been worse, you know?” He sighs, getting up. There’s some kind of hemp bracelet on one of his wrists. He really has turned into a hippie. You get up too, and follow him out of the room, figuring that there’s something you can help with.

_

Jeyne was hanging out with you at your mom’s place the other day, sharing your haul of discounted Easter candy you’d gotten from the Walgreens as well as rosewater lokum from the Greek grocery store, now that the holiday was over. She drank a Red Bull, you just made some tea for yourself. She was on the couch near the TV, her arms wrapped around her knees, her shoulders tensed. She’s often like that without seeming to realize. She was barefoot, instead of just wearing socks. You told her that it was okay for you to wear your socks in the house and your mom just was used to having people take their shoes off, that was all, but she just shrugs every time she comes in and takes off her socks and puts each one in their corresponding shoe.

The commercials came on and she turned to you, as if waiting for you to say something first, and for a moment you were wondering if she had said something and you zoned out, but then she talked anyway. “I just want to thank you,” she said quietly, looking right at you, her brown eyes a deep color like black coffee. She didn’t blink.

“I…” you weren’t sure what to tell her. “You don’t have to,” you said finally. Because, if she thought she wouldn’t have made it out without you, then you could say the same for yourself, that if not for her, you’re not sure where you’d be but it definitely wouldn’t be safe on your mom’s couch.

Jeyne shook her head. “It’s not about that, Theon,” she said, her voice so gentle with you, even if there was something intense in her eyes that was all the more noticeable by how small and physically unassuming she was. “It’s…well. You know. When it was me and my dad and I was a kid no one ever helped us. When I was in the system no one ever helped me. When I aged out no one helped me. I was all on my own most of my life.” Maybe that’s why she’s held onto herself, you think, because for so long, she didn’t have anyone but herself. “I got used to it. I got used to surviving that way. But…it was hard. I haven’t even told you half of it,” she said, her eyes mournful and large, not quite watering, but close. Like the eyes of one of the martyr icons all over your mom’s place. “But you were there for me. We got out together.” She put her arm around your shoulder. “I just wanted to remind you, you know? We got the hell out of there.” A strange smile played across her face, like she wasn’t used to smiling. She isn’t, you don’t think. 

You tried to smile back. You have fake teeth now- between the drugs and Ramsay you’d lost quite a few. The dentists tell you, well, you don’t have to say fake teeth, like they’re trying to placate you, but you don’t care. A lot of things are fake. Doesn’t mean they’re not there. “Thanks,” you told her. “For reminding me. And, you know. For being there when I was alone.”

She adjusted the sleeve of her very much oversized Patriots sweatshirt. Jeyne was always wearing things that covered her up like that. You’d never know there were scars on her back, her shoulders, her forearms. “You know,” you told her, “nothing is wrong with the way you look. You’re not…ugly or anything, in fact, you’re pretty. There isn’t anything wrong with you.” Which, of course, you probably should have known was not really the issue at hand, because she just shook her head and looked at you with an expression that said, oh, here we go. “Not that I’m trying to be weird or come on to you or anything like that,” you added. She probably knew that, but still.

Jeyne shrugged, a strangely jerking motion. “It’s just sometimes easier to keep things to myself. Sometimes if people see those parts of me, that’s all they see,” she explained.

“Oh,” you said. “Yeah. I get it,” because you could say the same about a lot of things about yourself. It’s strange, still, to have someone who understands you, and who you can understand, the way you and Jeyne have each other. You’re not used to it and neither is she. But you suppose you’re both doing fine enough, considered.

_

You and Jon end up downstairs in the kitchen; he said he wanted to be by the door when his family started coming home. Rickon probably is going to be first. Seeing him as a teen will be surreal. “Do you want anything to drink?” Jon asks you.

Almost as a reflex, because you remember when you’d be asked this question, and it wouldn’t really be a question, and the circumstances would never be in the afternoon in the kitchen of someone you grew up with, with familiar faces on pictures stuck to the refrigerator and cartoonish dog-shaped salt and pepper shakers on the table, you answer, “no, I’ve been sober two years.” You stupid fucking junkie, your own voice replays in your mind. At least it’s not Ramsay’s. But it’s his words. If Jon was going to find out, it could have at least been later, and differently. Maybe at least two years will sound good to him. Maybe he won’t ask too much, and he’ll think it began and ended with alcohol.

Jon is quiet for a second, as if he hadn’t expected to hear that. “I just meant like. Water or coffee or something,” he said. You don’t say anything and try not to look away from him. “But…congratulations,” he tells you, “that’s- that’s really good. I’m happy for you.” Yeah, you consider saying, you could say when I woke up in the hospital after almost accidentally killing myself, my mom sure was happy.

“Water is good,” you tell him, your voice sounding toneless. “Thank you.”

You look down into the glass of water for a moment before drinking it. It is clear, and cold, and two years deep, maybe more. Of course, you always have to get to the bottom of the glass to find out how deep it goes.

_

For a while you really did blame yourself for Robb’s death. Not because you thought you were some kind of hero who would have saved him and made sure the drunk driver would have gotten arrested or anything. You were just used to being at fault, or at least, being blamed. When you first came here and your mom asked you in the store what color toothbrush you wanted and the person behind you snapped _I don’t see why these people can’t just speak English_ you knew it was your fault for not knowing enough English yet, otherwise your mom would have been practicing with you. When your dad would have what he called “difficult days” (he never sought therapy, and you think he probably never will) he wouldn’t exactly blame you but it definitely felt like he thought it was your fault, for being a reminder that your brothers were no longer alive. When the guy down the street got laid off, and his son, who sat behind you in math class asked you if you were rich because he heard “you guys” were all rich where you came from, you’d been in this country long enough to know he was blaming you, for his father losing his job, for anyone else losing their job, for the possibility that one day he may lose his job, because that was what people did in this country. You’re glad your history classes never went over the history of where you and your family came from. You know how it would have gone. How it always goes. ( _It didn’t happen but maybe it did, either way, they had it coming_.)

(The day that guy had yelled at Asha at work and your family talked about it, you looked over to your mom and asked her, “why do people hate us so much?” Your father had answered before she could. He said that was just the way it was and you were old enough to know that by now, he’d had no choice but to know when he was your age.)

And when you met Ramsay, he confirmed everything you’d suspected and known. 

Until the day at the Snowy Sky Motel, the one motel that wasn’t a chain, that was an exit off this one rest stop with a Dunkin Donuts, in some North-Central Massachusetts town you were always getting confused with all the other North-Central Massachusetts towns. The one where everything was surrounded by trees and it looked like someone could just disappear in there, the endless forests and long roads that you could look out of the window into and see sparse lines of abandoned warehouses and big box stores. The one where the girl who worked the counter was this nice, quiet, dark-eyed girl named Jeyne, spelled like that, not Jane or even Jayne like Mansfield, who always wore huge sweaters even in hot weather. She was always nice to you. She asked you under her breath if you were safe, when Ramsay would drag you in for parties in one of the motel rooms, because he thought it was “rustic,” because his dad probably wouldn’t let him have his kind of parties at his house given that he owned it. You told her you were safe, but you knew she didn’t believe you. One day Ramsay just led you out of the rented room, away from his friends, away from their drinks and knife-throwing contests. He took you behind the motel, where he was parked, and told you to get in the car and wait, so you did. You heard a few cars pull away. It sounded like his friends’ cars. You weren’t sure how long you waited or what you were waiting for, but your pulse quickened so much you felt like you’d been running.

Ramsay opened the car door, but before that, you could hear screaming. He’d waited, you realized, he’d been here enough times to know when there likely wouldn’t be anyone staying there who would see. No other guests to say anything. It wasn’t like he was really concerned about hurting any people. He just had to make sure the only witness wouldn’t tell.

You smelled smoke before you even saw the fire.

He threw Jeyne in next to you. He was wearing his red leather gloves. “What did you do? What are you doing?” she was screaming at him but he ignored her like she wasn’t there, and then she turned to you. “Who is he?” she asked you, grabbing onto your hands. “I live there. My room is there. Other people live there too. He burned my house down. Theon. That’s your name. Come on, Theon, tell me what you know, we can get out of here.” You shook your head silently, rapidly, your eyes pleading with her not to talk, or ask questions, because it would make him mad. She mouthed the question, is he a murderer? But you shook your head because what if he saw her asking that through the rearview mirror? Because sometimes you wondered the same and you didn’t know.

And she started kicking at the door, hitting the windows that she didn’t know were made of special glass- like he was the president in his Secret Service car or something. It looked like she’d done this before, you realized. And then she just screamed and screamed this awful howl of terror and what you think may have been pure rage. A deep sound that didn’t sound like it would come from her, but it did.

“She’s kind of a fucking drag,” Ramsay had told you later, “but she couldn’t be telling the police. After all, regardless of what you’ve done, I don’t want you to get in trouble.” You stared at him uncomprehendingly, but then you understood, just as he explained. “Your fingerprints, your DNA, were there. Mine aren’t,” he said knowingly, raising his gloved hands. “And besides. You’ve admitted to me you’ve lost control of yourself when you were drunk and high. I witnessed that many times. You had problems. And people with problems relapse. You may not have set the fire on purpose, but it happened anyway, and you didn’t know what to do, especially because you were so under the influence, you knew you’d get in trouble.” He looked at you, pausing for a moment, and then leaned in close.

“That’s what everyone will believe,” he whispered, “everyone who counts.” He was enjoying this so clearly you wondered if he’d done anything like this before, or if you were just his culmination, his master-work. “You need to stay with me,” Ramsay said, stroking your hair. “You need me.” You supposed he was right. You did need him, because if you left, you know what he’d say about the fire that the news was reporting as a freak accident which thankfully harmed no one because the motel seems to have been unoccupied. You didn’t even question the holes in his proposed narrative. He did it because he could get away with it, and it looked like he was going to.

It wasn’t your fault, you realized. Robb. People knowingly do horrible things all the time even if they don’t care. They often get away with it. If you had been there and gotten Asha to drive the both of you home, the guy probably would have just run over someone else. Would that have been your fault then, if it was someone else? Robb wouldn’t have blamed you. That was just as important. You should have known that, you realized, and you should have known that Ramsay would have noticed the motel girl asking if you were safe all those times, he would have been angry with her too, not just you.

“I’m so sorry,” you told Jeyne, the first night. Her eyes were wild, like a cornered animal, and she was shaking, almost as uncontrollably you did when you were doing meth. She grabbed onto your wrists with both her hands so tightly you could feel her pulse.

She shook her head a few times. “No,” she said under her breath, “we’re gonna get out of here and then _he’ll_ be,” then her mouth twisted and she closed her eyes and teardrops forced their way out between her eyelids.

_

“Jon, I’m just going to tell you,” you say after drinking some water. “You don’t have to worry about me being in your family’s house. I’m not going to…” You could say you’re not going to ruin the weekend or Robb’s memorial, but who the hell knows, you think grimly. “I’m not going to…drink or use or anything.” You could have just said drink, and not mentioned using, you think, wondering how you manage to keep fucking this up. It’s probably because whenever you actually do talk about this, it’s on purpose, to people who would know anyway. Your mom, Asha, Jeyne, even your father when you fought with him about this.

“Of course not,” Jon says. “If you’re uncomfortable with being around wine or beer at the memorial or-”

You give him a closed-mouth smile. “I never liked wine much. Not hard enough for me,” you say, and when he looks stunned, you laugh. It was true, he remembers that, from all those high school parties. He won’t remember or even know that Ramsay liked wine, that red wine was his go-to drink, and the smell of it made you sick to your stomach, and you still can’t stand the sight of red wine. “Don’t worry about me, really, Jon. I’m okay now,” you say, which maybe isn’t actually a lie, you realize. “I went to meetings.” You actually did, in the past, NA and AA, but mostly it was therapy that helped you. “I got help.” You stare him down. “Are _you_ all right?” you ask him pointedly.

Jon is quiet for a moment. “I am now,” he said. “I have been for a while.” He looks at you for a second. “Hey,” he says. “I haven’t been here in a while. You want to take a walk around the neighborhood?” You haven’t been here in a while, either. Not to this house.

“Why not?” you tell him, getting up.

_

At first when Ramsay told you he wouldn’t let you drink or take drugs you didn’t think it was controlling, even though, looking back, he clearly didn’t give a fuck about your health. You told yourself that it was for the better that he told you what to do. He’d regularly hit you because, he said, he didn’t know how else to get you to stop. And you thought, fair enough, I don’t know how to stop and no one else managed to stop me before. The meth sores and track marks were replaced by what his hands left behind on your skin. He forced you to go through withdrawal at his house and wouldn’t let you go to the hospital when you realized it was happening, and you thought you were going to die in there and no one was ever going to know what happened to you, and he told you, this has to be done, it has to happen this way, or else the doctors will just give you pills and it will never be over, just trust me, if you don’t you’ll never get better. You could barely whisper for help at that point. 

He was always saying “you dumbass fucking junkie,” “you brain-dead tweaker,” even long after you’d stopped using anything, even stopped drinking. Even after you were long off drugs, he’d say you weren’t _clean_ because once you were on that shit you could never be off it, once a junkie always a junkie, so you’d be dirty forever. He said, “before you met me, you were letting anyone do you, you were putting all kinds of shit in your system, you’d probably have OD’d by now.” You didn’t contradict him. He always loved bringing up the fact that he’d personally helped you up into his red Hummer like he’d pulled you out of a grave or something, like he’d saved you. For a long time, you just told yourself he somehow knew you.

You sometimes wonder what it says about you that even after you got away from Ramsay you went back to drugs. One shitty relationship to another. No more meth that time - you never really liked it all that much, even when you were doing it. After Ramsay, it was just heroin needles and crushed Oxys, those sonorous children of the poppy.

Despite everything, you still miss it sometimes.

The last time, you stole money out of your mother’s purse, enough that she wouldn’t notice, enough to get some lower quality product to get you good and fucked up out of your mind, which you did, along with having more than a few shots’ worth of vodka from the liquor store on the way back home. You left the empty bottle on the street a block before getting home, out of some delusion that if you didn’t bring it home your mom wouldn’t think you were drinking again. Also, you didn’t like bringing drinks home because you ended up drinking in bed to fall asleep and it somehow always made you think it was a bad omen, reminding you of Marilyn Monroe dying in bed with a dinner plate. You weren’t trying to die or anything. Just to make everything go away for a little while. Of course, that last time you drank too much vodka as well as taking shit that was cut with fentanyl and woke up in the hospital. You kept trying to apologize to your mom as soon as she saw you were right there. You weren’t that coherent, so you weren’t sure if she heard that you’d stolen the money to get that shit from her, and that was part of why you were apologizing.

You told that to Jeyne. Alone, just the two of you. She said to you that they could be helpful, she knew people who credited their recovery to the meetings, but if you didn’t want to tell them some things, that was all right. That telling people about yourself was like giving yourself over, and sometimes she just couldn’t do that. That telling everything to people she didn’t know was something she didn’t know how to do either, even if she said she didn’t think you should have been making up things at meetings the way you sometimes did, even if it was mostly small things, and didn’t really agree with how you sometimes only went for the free cake and stuff because you didn’t want to pay for dinner. You tell her sometimes you still dream about him, about the first time you saw him, and he reached out his white hand and just about pulled you into his Hummer. When you watched _Requiem For a Dream_ together and you saw the final scenes, you told her you saw yourself. You tell her sometimes at work you feel like you shouldn’t be trusted to hold scissors. You tell her you don’t know why you do some things.

There’s a lot you tell Jeyne you haven’t told anyone else.

You had thought Robb was the only person in your life who’d ever get it. She had thought, so she told you, that telling other people about her life was pointless because no one cared and no one would believe her anyway. You’d understood, because you’d felt the same.

_

You and Robb used to walk around the neighborhood, or around town, all the time. You would sometimes walk to school in the mornings (always his idea) or you’d walk home from school, or you’d walk around if it was snowing a little but not too much, or if it was a nice warm day even if you had allergies. Sometimes you’d walk around town at night, and talk about what you wanted to do when you were older.

“I love it here, I really do,” Jon says as the two of you walk down the street. Most of the houses are the same, you realize, maybe mostly the same families. Not that you knew that many people in this part of town, but still. “It’s just hard to be here sometimes because of all the memories this place has.”

“Yeah,” you say to him. The green grass on the lawn in front of the house you’re walking by is as vivid and new-looking as the colors of the American flag outside the house.

You remember the small house you lived in with your family. In one of the windows your family had the Armenian flag hanging in front of it, inside the house. The blue stripe was in the middle, but you were told it meant the sky. It was in between the red on top and the orange on the bottom. It faded a little, but when the sun came out, or the moon was full, the colors were always bright. When you looked at it, you could pretend your life could be whatever you wanted, and it was on the other side of the window, shining the colors of the home you once had.

“It’s like…ever since I came back here, I see anything and it just takes me back to when we were younger.” You exhale. “Thinking about that just…makes me wonder what if I had done things differently.” You turn your head to look at Jon, who was always significantly taller than you, so you’re also turning your head upwards, as well. He does that thing where people close their eyes when they nod, which kind of makes him look like a professor or something.

“I get that too,” Jon tells you, “but I try not to regret too much. There’s nothing that can be done about the past.” You think that’s exactly why people tend to think about the past so much. But that’s another discussion, you suppose. “It’s strange trying to explain this to other people sometimes. That the memories from here aren’t great even if they’re technically good memories, or the other way around, like when I’m not here it still feels like home despite everything.” It’s not exactly like that for you but you get what he means.

“They’re supposed to be remembered,” you say.

“Yeah,” he says, “that’s another thing. It’s like…I don’t want to forget even the bad things. It’s my life, my family.” It’s too bad, you think, that it’s only now that you and Jon are getting to talk about this, but at least it’s better than it never happening. “You know that book by Stephen King? Where those kids have to defeat the monster that lives in their town sewer system?”

“Yeah,” you say, a bit unsure of where this is going, but comparably, it’s not too weird of a turn in conversation.

“Those kids loved that town. The monster was their town and they had to kill it, but it still brought them together, you know? The bad and the good memories weren’t separate from each other.” You find yourself nodding in agreement.

“Yeah, I actually get exactly what you mean,” you say. You’d watched that old miniseries with Jeyne when it played on TV last Halloween and your mom was handing out candy to the kids. In a way those friends in the series reminded you of yourself and her. “I even lived with the evil clown in his sewer for a while,” you say, half-smiling at Jon, but not laughing. He looks at you for a moment like he doesn’t know what to say.

“You know something?” you ask him. He looks at you and shakes his head. “So when I started living away from here I would have dreams about the road you take coming off the highway. Like when you go by the huge car wash sign and go straight and then on each side, a cemetery. I would just dream about that all the time. Not nightmares or anything. I would just dream I was going by them, and when I dreamed, I kept thinking, I’m almost home.” You’re silent for a moment. “I never thought of it as home when I was awake. Not even when I lived here.” Jon looks at you for a moment, like he’s trying to understand. “Sometimes Robb would ask me if I ever wanted to go back, you know? Because I was always telling him about it.” Jon has to know what you mean. “But I never knew. I didn’t think no. But I wasn’t sure about yes, either. I never really knew where I wanted to be. But when I was around him, it didn’t bother me so much.”

Jon puts his hand on your shoulder, walking that way for a minute. He nods quietly, looking right at you, and you figure he’s not sure what to tell you, but the fact that he’s listening is enough, you think. You never liked talking about some parts of your life to many people. Being listened to, really listened to, wasn’t something you were used to.

“We should get back soon,” he tells you. “My family will be coming.”

_

Before she drove over here with you, you and Asha got on the subject of your father.

“He doesn’t hate you,” Asha said. If you have to say someone doesn’t hate you, that isn’t exactly encouraging, but you didn’t tell her that.

“That’s news,” you told her blandly. Sometimes you wonder if you hate him or if you’re just mad at him. Maybe you’re too exhausted to hate. For his part, you wonder if hatred or anger or whatever it is that’s inside of him stays because he’d rather not let sadness in. In recovery, you’re supposed to apologize and make amends to everyone who had been harmed as a result of your addiction. You suppose your father was one of those people. But you never apologized, even though he had to have known you apologized to Asha and your mom. And he never asked for you to, either. You don’t know what that means.

Your father, who you don’t know how to call dad, who you forgot how to call Hayrik. With his hard dark eyes, his closed face. His faded jagged tattoos from his military days on his arms and back. The way you sometimes heard him speak softly to your mother, the way he never spoke in English if he could help it. Your father who never slept much, who you heard getting up at night to talk to your mother when you were a kid. Your father who saw you come home from Robb’s funeral dead-eyed, and told you, as if he intended it as a comfort or at least a sort of grounding: _you know that being alive means outliving people_. 

“You know everything in our family is a lot more complicated than just. Love and hate,” she said, which she was right about, but that didn’t mean you had to make it any more of your problem than it already is, you wanted to say to her.

“It doesn’t seem that complicated for you,” you said, and it came out plaintive and confused, like you were nineteen again and thought she had a life as close to good as anyone in your family could ever had. Which meant an actual life, and maybe that was because she was the only one of you who really tried for it. You knew, by now, it wasn’t like that for her. It was never like that.

“It is,” she told you, with a flatness in her voice that made her sound almost run-down. “I’m pretty much the only person he opens up to about anything anymore. Have been for years. Ever since he and Mayrik separated. I mean, sometimes they still talk. It’s just, you know how they are. It will never be the same with them again.” She pauses for a moment. And you think about how much you don’t know. “Do you know,” she asked you, “how many times I’ve tried to get him to reconcile with you?”

You really didn’t know this happened at all, even if it didn’t exactly surprise you to hear it. “You can’t make him do anything, Asha,” you told her. “You know that.”

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’m not trying to make you do anything, either. It’s just that…sometimes it feels like he’s my responsibility.” Not for the first time, you wondered if Asha wasn’t a much better person than you ever would be. “He told me the other day he has no country anymore. That he didn’t know what his life would be without me.” Her voice was so calm and practical. It would frighten you if your father said something like that to you. Asha turned to look at you. “Our family is so fucked up, Theon. I know we have more problems than we’ll ever be able to fix. I just want us to be able to be a little less fucked up while we all still have a chance.” You mean before someone dies, you didn’t say, but thought. It’s not like neither of you had ever had to think about the possibility. (It’s not like she hadn’t had to declare you a missing person.) “Do you really blame me for that?”

You shook your head, silently. You couldn’t blame her for doing what she thought she had to do. Not anymore, at least. 

_

The cars come in one by one until it looks like there’s a small party in the Starks’ house. If you consider a memorial service a party, you’re not so far off. But you don’t say anything about that. In fact, you keep pretty quiet throughout the night. You answer questions, you say hello, and it’s good to see everyone. But mostly, you let everyone else speak first, because it hits you that you’re the only person outside of the family who’s here.

Jon goes outside to smoke a cigarette. “Those are bad for your health,” Bran says in his soft voice, his tone sage and knowing, in that strange way he’s always had.

“I know,” Jon says, smiling at Bran. As soon as he’s gone, Sansa anxiously says something about his lungs and how he should stop before it’s too late.

“I’ll be right there,” you say, not looking at anyone, following Jon outside. You don’t smoke, never have- cigarettes, at least. Somehow it never entered your mind to do that. It couldn’t make everything go away the way drinking could, the way meth or heroin or oxy could. The way they undeniably did, at least temporarily. Just fly away, or at least float into oblivious rest.

You go outside into the late-spring night air. Humid, as it often is in New England when it gets warm. A sort of smothering feeling, sometimes. Like being wrapped in plastic, a contrast all the more noticeable when you get used to how cold it gets here, before it starts warming up again. Or maybe it’s just global warming, which you can remember Bran lecturing you about back when he was a little kid, which always made you wonder where he learned all of that, if it was healthy for such a young child to think of such awful things all the time, which brought you back to thinking well, when you were his age, you had no choice but to think about how the world really was either.

“You shouldn’t smoke those,” you tell Jon wryly. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying what your family’s saying.”

“I know,” Jon sighs, looking guilty, breathing out smoke into the air, like it’s the middle of winter. “I want to stop.”

“If I can stop then so can you,” you tell him, “believe me on that one.” He looks at you like he’s trying to figure out whether or not you’re making fun of him, when really he should be wondering whether or not you’re joking about yourself. You wonder if he’d feel as bad as he feels if he knew the full extent of what your own addictions put your family through.

“Thank you, Betty Ford,” he says to you in such a serious tone if you didn’t know what he was saying you wouldn’t realize he was being sarcastic, which makes you genuinely laugh for the first time all day. “Well,” he continues, “you’re definitely not Nancy.”

“You were never this funny when we were younger,” you tell him.

“I was. Just not around you,” he says, the corners of his mouth going up a little as he crushes the remainder of his cigarette with his shoe.

You take a deep breath, wondering if any secondhand smoke you may or may not have inhaled makes any difference to your health at this point. “Why did you and your family invite me?” you ask, almost quietly, hoping you don’t come off as rude. You genuinely want to know. Why you, why only you and no one else. “To your house, specifically. I don’t just mean the memorial.”

Because it’s what Robb would have done, you expect to hear. Because, you’re a charity case, you don’t expect to hear, you don’t expect that any of them would have consciously thought that, but maybe subconsciously.

Jon looks at you, quiet for a moment. “Because you knew him as much as any one of us did,” he tells you. “I don’t know if you realize that. But it’s true.” You don’t know what to say in response. It seems like this will be how it goes when the two of you talk to each other- sometimes one of you will say something and the other will not have anything to say in return, but listening can be enough.

He goes back inside and you follow him. The way you did with Robb countless times. And you never will again, but you suppose it has to count for something, that you’re alive still. 

_

Sometimes you told Ramsay what you really thought. In the beginning of your relationship you made one of your rich-American-white-boy jokes you used to make with Robb except you really meant it and the sharp tone of your voice made that very clear to him. He grabbed your wrist hard enough it left a bruise like a slap bracelet, and told you to shut the fuck up, just shut your fucking mouth for once. You told him, smiling at him, that he picked you up off the highway and he thought that meant he could just do whatever to you and get away with it. That he liked feeling powerful, but not only that, he liked feeling like he was better than other people, so he looked for people he didn’t respect. People who didn’t have things handed to them, people who didn’t have the advantages he did. He told you to look in the mirror, and think about the shit you did with your life before he found you, and if any of it was really exceptional.

So you told him, look at yourself, you’ve never done any real work in your life and everything you have is on your father’s bill and even he was born rich anyway, and you asked him, why should you look up to him for any reason other than he’s always knocking you down? 

That struck a nerve, because you’d barely ever seen him that mad before that. So you don’t let yourself regret that one. He was hurting you anyway. “Someone needed to tell him, even if it probably didn’t go through.” That was what Jeyne said. For a long time after, when you felt bad, sometimes she’d tell you it was him. “That motherfucker,” as she called him and sometimes still does, was in your head and you had to stop listening to him because he always lied. You wondered if she never believed anything he told her about herself. Or if he was just another person in a long line of people telling her the same shit and she was in a way used to it.

(“I don’t belong anywhere,” you told Robb once. “I’m not going to college. Not here or anywhere. But I don’t know if I’m going to stay here after I graduate either.” Here as in- your house. This town. From there, you weren’t sure what else you meant by _here_. Although somehow you felt you’d never leave the country, like it wasn’t an option for you anymore.

“That’s not true,” Robb said, looking at you like he was concerned. “Even if you’re not happy here…and I understand, believe me, I understand why you wouldn’t be…don’t say you don’t belong anywhere. I don’t believe that.”

You did. You looked at him, wondering how someone so kind cared about you so much. “I’ll visit you at college,” you told him, not trying to change the subject, just not wanting to stay at this particular angle. “You’ll be really close anyway. I probably won’t end up going too far away.” It was true. You were going to visit him all the time. You didn’t think it was an option for you to go too far- where would you go, anyway? – and besides. You didn’t want to be far away from him.)

You think maybe it’s not that Ramsay made you believe bad things about yourself, so much as, he took the opportunity when he realized some of your worst thoughts about yourself were some of his most charitable thoughts about you.

_

Dreaming in the darkness of the Starks’ guest room, where people you knew must have slept where you are sleeping, and people you did not know either. Like the many beds in hotels you’d been in, like the bed in Ramsay’s house-

When you were seventeen you’d always hear people say “you have your whole life ahead of you,” to you and Robb and Jon and all your classmates. And sometimes it wouldn’t sound the way they meant it, it wouldn’t sound inspiring, it would sound imposing. And when you were riding down dark rural roads, with hardly even a streetlight or a lit building nearby, nothing ahead but the road itself in its seemingly endless track into nothingness you would think about that, your whole life ahead of you; as the drugs entered your system as it usually did on nights like that, and your eyes would adjust to the darkness and you could see outlines of old houses and battered road signs and abandoned places and you’d think of how when Robb died everyone said he had his whole life ahead of him, but it had to have been a different life than this, than yours. And then everything would slow down, your breath and your body, and pain would fade, and even the car racing down the road or the driver holding you if the car was off would slow down. This was your language, you’d think, not English, not Armenian, not anything in words. This was what you understood. And in the morning when the sun came up you would wonder how much had been real, and how much had only been real to you.

And when the evening came again it would be similar. Go to a bar or some stop by the highway, and wait, and someone would find you. Sometimes you would worry what Robb would think of you. But if you drank enough, or injected enough heroin or swallowed enough pills, you’d forget so much that your own name barely meant everything. If you smoked enough meth, you even felt alive. But feeling alive wasn’t as good, compared to what else you learned you could feel. To stare down the endless roads in front of you, the life ahead of you, but not looking backward. You had a whole life behind you, too, and no matter how many oceans you crossed it would always be there over your shoulder, and you knew it very well.

You dream, in the Starks’ house, you’re in Robb’s room and you’re both seventeen again. You should try to make amends with him, you think. But he was gone before all of that. You just look out the window of his room out into the street. It’s snowing, he always loved the winter best. It’s a short dream. You wake up soon after in the guest bed, and think about what that all may have meant, and then you go back to sleep again.

_

One day when Ramsay left the house and locked the two of you inside, Jeyne started talking to you. You never had anywhere to go and when you were alone you would always start thinking, what if he never came back. Not necessarily that he would leave you there, but what if he crashed his car and died, or what if he was arrested for any of the very long list of things he could logically be arrested for, and then you were there forever, and no one would ever find you, and for all you knew his dad would know where you are but would keep it quiet. You by then knew Ramsay would never let you go voluntarily. Nothing about you, no matter how revolting in his eyes, would get him to set you free.

When Jeyne came, you were convinced he would eventually kill her, unless she somehow got out.

“When I was growing up I lived with my dad,” Jeyne began quietly, a tinge of a Boston accent in her voice. “We didn’t have much but that was all right. We got by. He ran this convenience store. He worked hard, and taught me a lot. I knew all about numbers and math and finances because of him. I actually liked math. It helped me understand money better which helped me get the world better, you know?” You didn’t say anything. “So after he was gone and I was in the system, I was doing really bad in school. Even when I got the material, I just couldn’t do it. I had too much going on. In math class I understood everything but I just kind of turned into a robot. Like for an hour of the day I was just this metal machine and nothing could get through me. I just remembered what he taught me and in the back of my mind for years I just let myself think if I knew this stuff it meant I could you know, do what he did. I could run my own life even if I wasn’t rich or anything I could still be free of everything. That was…” she shook her head. “Until I was eighteen I was just dead-set on getting out. I would imagine myself just opening the door of the home and running until it was all gone. And then I’d have the most important part done. I would just remind myself that my dad didn’t have it so easy growing up either. And if he could get out then so could I. I had to.” She balled up her hand into a fist and rubbed one of her gray-lined eyes, then looked at you. “Now you, Theon,” she said. “You tell me about someone who cared about you. Tell me something good.”

You were quiet for a moment. Any moment, Ramsay could have come back. But he hadn’t gone long, and he often took a long time. So you looked at her, and she smiled at you, just a little, like she was telling you it was okay.

You thought about talking about your mom or Asha, but didn’t know how to begin. Every time you remembered them, you thought you’d definitely never see them again. Which made you think of Robb, who you knew you would never see again.

“When I was in high school,” you told Jeyne, “I met this boy. And pretty soon he was my best friend, the first one I ever really had. His name was Robb.” You could tell from Jeyne’s face that she knew what you meant by _was_. You took a deep breath and continued, and told her anything that came to your mind about him. You told her that you loved him.

She balled up her fist again and rubbed her left eye. It was so bruised it looked like she was smearing black makeup when she was moving her hand. “He’d want you to get out of here,” she told you. And you knew Ramsay might never let you go, but he’d kill you before letting you leave. And you knew that Jeyne would take the first opportunity she could to get out, and she’d never leave you behind, and you knew one of those things was bound to happen soon.

_

When you and Robb’s family and some high school friends- you recognize a few people but you’re not sure if they recognize you- gather around the doors to the school and begin to walk in, you have the sense that you were never supposed to be here. Not that you’re not supposed to be at Robb’s memorial (although you probably would have felt like that if this was years earlier), but that you’re not supposed to be returning to this school. And maybe you were never supposed to be in this school or town or state or even this country in the first place, but it’s the returning part that gets you feeling like you’re in a haunted house movie, the kind where they think they’re the alive ones until the end reveals they’re the ones who are ghosts.

Brown brick building, metallic-bronze letters saying the name of the school that shine in the bright sunlight of the late morning. In front of it, a signboard that says the name of the school, and underneath, in the changeable letters that would announce events, _Congratulations Class of 2014_ even though it feels a little early for that. Aged trolley tracks right next to the building. They only ran seasonally in your time- you don’t know about now. You would walk across them to get to school. Sometimes on windy days you would stand in front of them and close your eyes and imagine the wind was the force of a fast train running by, strong enough to pull you in close. And Robb would say, hey Theon, what are you doing, we’re going to be late.

One of the school administrators gives a very short speech and then everyone gathers around the plaque to be photographed. Which of course includes you, it’s just strange to think about. You’re off to the side, almost right at the edge of the picture. And then you hear Mr. and Mrs. Stark and their family talk about preparing for the memorial service at home, and you suppose that it’s time for you to go, too.

_

You visited Ramsay once. It was a few years ago, pretty soon, maybe a few months after you stopped using for good. You didn’t tell anyone in the groups, or any of the doctors or even the dentist who was working on your teeth. You told Jeyne, even though she kept asking you if you were sure you really wanted to do it, which you took to mean that she didn’t want you to go but she didn’t want to tell you what to do. You told Asha, so she could take you, and she told you eventually you’d have to tell your mom about it, but you didn’t for a long time.

When you got there he put his hand up to the glass in a gesture so forceful he looked like he was trying to break it, but it wouldn’t, although the site made your stomach churn. It reminded you of Jeyne banging on the windows of his car from the inside. You think she’s a much better person than you are sometimes. When he was sentenced, your first thought was to be relieved. She whispered to you in the courtroom that she was worried what he would do to the other inmates, that they never asked to be locked up with him any more than the two of you did.

“So,” he told you, his wormlike lips contorting into a satisfied smile. “You finally came back to me. Missed me, didn’t you?” He looked you up and down as you tried to breathe in, breathe out, like your therapist said. Your mouth was hanging open a little as you did it, but you didn’t really care. “Those must be new teeth,” he said. “But I was there for you before you had those. We made a lot of memories together, didn’t we? I know your memory has…issues. I understand if you need reminders.” His voice was so deceptively soft. It always had been. “I can help you remember. I’ll do that.” He smiled wide, his mouth closed, his eyes fixed right on you. 

You nodded blankly. Next to you a woman maybe around your age was talking to someone who was probably her boyfriend. The both of them were crying and you looked away. It wasn’t for you to see. “That’s not why I came here, Ramsay,” you told him. You can say his name, you told yourself. It’s not like if you say his name he’ll jump out of a mirror and kill you. It’s not like he hasn’t already done his damage.

He raised his eyebrows at you like you had just given him the keys to the prison and said you’d be waiting outside for him. “Oh?” he asked in that pretentious way he had.

You inhaled, your mouth closed that time. You made yourself look him in the face. “I needed to know that I would be able to do it,” you said to him. “You know, to come here.” Before you could say anything else, he interrupted you.

“And why wouldn’t you be able to?” he said with a cloyingness that only emphasized how patronizing he was to you when he thought he was sounding generous and kind.

“I needed to know that I could choose on my own. That I could end this by walking away. I need to know that I could end this, my choice, not yours, not the courts, not the police.” Because sometimes, after you and Jeyne ran away and he got caught, you worried about that. Sometimes you think part of the reason why you went back to drugs was because you truly thought you’d have ended up back with him if he hadn’t been arrested, and you hated yourself for that. Either way you needed to know that you had it in you to leave on your own. You didn’t have complete faith in yourself, but you knew you had to do it.

Anger flashed in his eyes. You recognized it, maybe better than he could. “Get ahold of yourself, now,” he told you.

“Did you even listen to what I said,” you asked him, lowering your voice. The woman next to you was whispering _I love you, I love you so much_. “I came here so I could get away from you. So you would know I’m done.” It was hard to breathe normally, but you did as best as you could manage.

“I find that hard to believe,” Ramsay said to you, but there was hesitation in his tone.

“Believe whatever you want,” you told him. “You always do. But I’m not coming back to you. I am leaving.”

“You came all the way here just to leave? That doesn’t make any sense,” he told you, like he was about to start laughing at you and then saying all the things that were awful about you, and he wouldn’t be laughing then once he got started with that.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to you. It makes sense to me,” you said. You realized he would never understand, not if you sat here all day explaining. So you didn’t tell him to maybe think about it and then he’d understand. Sometimes you end up places you’re only meant to leave. Maybe, you thought for a brief moment, if you ever got on better terms with your father he’d get why you had to do this.

You stood up before he could say any more. You looked at him for a moment and you realized you weren’t forcing yourself to meet his eyes out of fear. All you saw was someone you understood too well, maybe more than he understood himself. Someone who had no control over you anymore. “Goodbye,” you told him.

“You don’t have anywhere to go,” he told you. No, not in particular, maybe, you thought. But that doesn’t mean I _can’t_ go anywhere.

“But that’s my problem,” you told him, still standing. “Not yours.” You took one last look at him and walked away. Maybe he started to say something, but you couldn’t see him anymore, and you didn’t want to. You thought of turning your head back just one last time. You thought, too late, of telling him you had stopped using and drinking, all on your own, and no one needed to lock you inside, or that if he ever got out on parole he’d better stay away from Jeyne because you would hate yourself if she ended up in prison over him and that was the only regret you’d have if she killed him. You didn’t go back and say anything else. You didn’t even stop walking ahead, not when you got to the metal detector, not when you got out into the hallway, not until you were outside and could see Asha’s black truck.

Only then did you look behind you at the prison. Tstesutsyun, you said to yourself, not really thinking about Ramsay, maybe just the person you used to be when you were with him. The kind of goodbye that lasts for good. Then you walked to Asha’s car and opened the door.

_

There are so many Starks they can’t all fit into one car, as usual, so you get in Jon’s car and ride along with him. The kids- although most of them aren’t technically kids anymore, you still see them that way- are divided between Mr. and Mrs. Stark.

Jon’s car is black, and looks like it needs to go to the carwash. There are old political bumper stickers on the bumper, the most recent of them Obama/Biden 2012. The license plate is a verdant green, with the words “Green Mountain State” on the bottom. It comes to you that Jon eventually got what he wanted when you were all young- to get out of town. Although, maybe, you think, after Robb died, he couldn’t stay. “Come on,” Jon tells you after a long silence. “You can come with me.”

You get into his car quietly, remembering Jon’s old book that somehow ended up among your stuff. You recently found it again when you were going through your things, cleaning your room at your mom’s place, given how there were corners that had gone untouched for years and drawers and boxes full of old things. The book was probably from when you had to do a local history essay in junior year and Jon lent you this one book for it. He wasn’t condescending about it to you, acting like it would be so, so much harder for you than everyone else even if you were in fact still learning stuff everyone else seemed to know not just about this area but the country as a whole. But you were learning, and you knew more than you thought you did, Asha told you one day.

The book was called _Total Loss Farm_ , by this author Ray Mungo who was big in the 60s, and he knew a lot of other big writers from the time. There was this one passage Jon had drawn a block around in pencil.

“ _Christ, Kerouac, you’re blowing my mind living in Lowell, will you never go back to Big Sur? Kerouac, listen: Frost came from Lawrence, too, hey from my neighborhood in South Lawrence, but he_ got out _man and he didn’t come back. Robert Frost! And didn’t Jack Kennedy make him poet laureate or something? Kerouac, see: Leonard_ Bernstein _came from here, but he_ got out! _Everybody from Lowell or Lawrence had half a break in this world_ split. _You stay here, you’re as good as dead baby.”_

Back then, you rolled your eyes, thinking Jon was kidding himself if he thought he was some kind of poet, and that this place wasn’t that bad. Not for him. You couldn’t understand why he felt the need to leave that vehemently, or why Big Sur or anywhere else in California, where it was hot all the time and there were constantly earthquakes, was much of an improvement. But now, you think maybe, on some level, Jon hadn’t highlighted that portion because he thought it was about him. Or maybe it didn’t matter why he had circled it. They were strong words about home. That’s usually enough to make an impression. In any case, they ended up circling around in your mind after you found them again, and still do. You think about how you and your family came here, to a place where so many people, even those from here, think of as a place that is best left behind, a place to never come to.

Robb had half a break, maybe more than that, but he never got to leave, although he didn’t die because of the town, you think. It wasn’t the town’s fault. Even if you spent so much of your youth fantasizing about leaving, it wasn’t about this town specifically. It was about having a life of your own, of being someone you actually wanted to be, being someone other people wanted. Feeling like you belonged anywhere, like you could ever experience feeling at home. It wasn’t the town that made you feel like you needed to leave, that it as a place was the problem. It went far beyond all of that. You knew you could have been in any other town and felt the same. Sometimes you felt you had been as good as dead since you were nine and would have been anywhere. This town taught you well. You learned who you were, even if you weren’t ready to know that person. If you were half dead, the other half of you was still alive, and maybe it had been the hope and work and defiance that living here taught you, that kept you alive, that kept you looking out the window, light shining through the flag in your old house, rather than staring at the ground and waiting to disappear, like you did so many times after, when you were older. 

“What are you thinking about,” Jon says. You’re nearly back at the Starks’ house, not too far away from where you had lived, from where your father still lives, but it is far apart if you do not count distance. “You’re being pretty quiet.”

“I know,” you tell him. “I thought it was a good dedication.” Jon nods quietly, solemnly.

“It was,” he says, almost under his breath.

“I was just thinking about how I’m…I’m fine being back here. I thought coming back would be hard, but it wasn’t. I think I needed to come back,” you tell Jon. “Is it the same for you?” You know he must have been thinking about what it would mean to come back, even if he didn’t think about it in the same way you did, even if he had been back for short day visits and holidays. He hadn’t really stayed here for real, not in a long time.

“Yeah,” Jon says after a moment, looking straight ahead, at the road. You lean back in the passenger seat. “I think it was time. I was ready.”

You wait until a red light to put your hand on his shoulder. “You were a great brother to him,” you tell him. You never pretended to entirely understand how their family worked- they didn’t pretend to understand yours either. But you knew that despite what Jon’s birth certificate said about his parentage making him a cousin, he was really Robb’s brother, he’s all those kids’ brother. “He would be happy that you’re living your life how you want. I think he would like that you came back, though.”

You don’t know what Jon is thinking. But you realize then you came back not to show yourself you could leave, but to show yourself that you could face the life you had lived, that you would not run from it, from Robb’s memory. That you came for yourself as much as you came for Robb.

There was a lot you didn’t miss here, but then, you found more of the same in other towns. Some things are all over the place, and others, you suppose, just follow you around. But in a way you did miss this town. You were used to it, for a while. There was a lot you had grown used to over the years here. Which maybe didn’t exactly make it home, but it made it important. It made it a part of your life.

“Jon,” you say, half-smiling to yourself because you just realized it, “I think I missed you.” You really did, you think, but maybe you won’t have to be missing him anymore, depending on how he thinks. If he wants to stay in touch. If he wants to hear more of what you have to say- you already know you’d listen if he had anything he wanted to tell you. In a way it feels like he’s not the only person who could understand you, or the person who could best understand you. But he was there when you were. And neither of you ever got to know each other as well as you could even when you did, and life gave you another chance. That all must count for something.

“I missed you too, man,” Jon says quietly, turning the corner, keeping his eyes right on the road. One of the better drivers from this state. Deep breaths, you tell yourself. Inhale, and exhale. 

The car stops and after a moment you realized you’re parked outside the Starks’ house. You realize you and Jon have been there for a few minutes, just parked. The kids are getting out of the other cars nearby along with Mr. and Mrs. Stark.

“Are you ready,” Jon asks you, so gently that his voice sounds far away, like he’s on the other side of the closed window. Other people will be arriving soon, and you know you can’t just sit in the passenger seat in Jon’s car forever. You don’t want to. You suppose you are more than ready, that you have been waiting almost ten years for this. Not for a memorial service, specifically. But to be able to say goodbye, to be able to grieve and remember and not be alone, and not have it consume you.

“Yes,” you tell Jon, looking at him briefly before you turn to the door, before you get out.

You are not particularly happy, but that won’t stop you from going. It never really did. You walk forward, wanting to go in, wanting to be there. Wanting to hear everyone else’s memories, and maybe even wanting to share your own, at least some of them. Not all of them, not just any of them, not right here and now. But you suppose they don’t all need to be kept secret inside of you forever. Even if you don’t tell many people. That’s fine. It’s not how many people you can tell things to, it’s finding the right people to confide in that’s the important thing. Maybe you always knew that, maybe you always knew a lot of things, but you got lost on the way. Maybe not so much anymore.

For the first time in years, for the first time since he died, you think Robb would be happy for you.

_

When you left Armenia you had the window seat on the airplane. After traveling up and across the country, to nearly the opposite side of it, you finally were about to leave. It seemed like such a long journey at the time. You were just nine. You’d never hitchhiked across multiple state lines before overnight. You wouldn’t have been able to so much as wrap your head around the things you’d be doing ten years later.

“Do you think we’ll ever come back?” you asked Asha. She just shifted her eyes towards your mother, who was leaning across the aisle to talk to your father, and told you to not talk so loud. Then she leaned closer to whisper into your ear.

“I don’t know,” she said to you. It was the first time she’d seemed so unsure to you.

You looked down and saw Mt. Ararat, tipped in snow, and nearby was Yerevan, a place you’d never been even if it wasn’t even very far away. Your parents had been there before. The mountain looked like it was a part of the sky, it was so great and vast.

This was a story you told Robb. It is a story you told Jeyne. It is a story you talk about with Asha sometimes. Each time you tell it you remember it like it had just happened a few moments ago, and usually the way you tell it is differently every time, and maybe sometimes it’s because you remember each time from a different perspective. But you always end up with the same perspective in the end. In the clouds, flying free and at peace for just one moment, one last moment at home. 

In that moment you felt like you were in the clouds floating, or flying, and you didn’t look away, your face right up against the window. It was probably the calmest moment you can remember. And even as it was happening you knew it would end, you knew the airplane was going forward, going West, and it wouldn’t stop or go back, and maybe you would never get to go back at all, that really hit you for the first time, that and everything else, so you just kept looking through the window, even when your eyes started stinging and you started sniffing and realized you were crying. You wanted to go home, but a part of you that did not yet know how to articulate this feeling thought it was somewhere behind you. Not in terms of direction, not eastward. In the past. You wept for your country, that was all that you knew; for no longer having one and not knowing anywhere anymore. Maybe you would go back one day. You sometimes allowed yourself to hope for this, and often longed for the past, for being nine and younger and knowing where your home was.

You rubbed your eyes and took one last look, and closed your eyes before the airplane could go further, and you’d have to see the view disappear. You kept the image inside your mind, so it would never leave you, and saw it with your eyes closed, as you flew above your first, and possibly last, real home, fearing you would forget. Even if it was possible you would see it again one day, you couldn’t be sure, you couldn’t know what the future held, and you were going to a place so unknown you would only have the past by your side, so you remembered, because you may not have ever been able to come back.

Every day since, you have remembered.

**Author's Note:**

> the driver who hit Robb was Joffrey.  
> Man I finally wrote an asoiaf fic after so long lol. Thank you for reading.


End file.
